It must be, at least, allowed, that this "ruling passion," antecedent to reason and observation, must have an object independent on human contrivance; for there can be no natural desire of artificial good. No man, therefore, can be born, in the strict acceptation, a lover of money; for he may be born where money does not exist: nor can he be born, in a moral sense, a lover of his country; for society, politically regulated, is a state contradistinguished from a state of nature; and any attention to that coalition of interests which makes the happiness of a country, is possible only to those whom inquiry and reflection have enabled to comprehend it. This doctrine is, in itself, pernicious, as well as false; its tendency is to produce the belief of a kind of moral predestination, or overruling principle which cannot be resisted; he that admits it is prepared to comply with every desire that caprice or opportunity shall excite, and to flatter himself that he submits only to the lawful dominion of nature, in obeying the resistless authority of his "ruling passion[135]." Pope has formed his theory with so little skill, that, in the examples by which he illustrates and confirms it, he has confounded passions, appetites, and habits. To the Characters of Men, he added soon after, in an epistle supposed to have been addressed to Martha Blount, but which the last edition has taken from her, the Characters of Women. This poem, which was laboured with great diligence, and in the author's opinion with great success, was neglected at its first publication, as the commentator supposes, because the publick was informed, by an advertisement, that it contained "no character drawn from the life;" an assertion which Pope probably did not expect or wish to have been believed, and which he soon gave his readers sufficient reason to distrust, by telling them, in a note, that the work was imperfect, because part of his subject was "vice too high" to be yet exposed. The time, however, soon came, in which it was safe to display the dutchess of Marlborough under the name of Atossa; and her character was inserted with no great honour to the writer's gratitude. He published, from time to time, between 1730 and 1740, imitations of different poems of Horace, generally with his name, and once, as was suspected, without it. What he was upon moral principles ashamed to own, he ought to have suppressed. Of these pieces it is useless to settle the dates, as they had seldom much relation to the times, and, perhaps, had been long in his hands.